Movies

The Matrix: Resurrections-Another Chance

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Few days after walking out on The Matrix: Resurrections, I realised that the movie I had been waiting for so long deserves at least a full watch. So today, I decided to watch it again, this time all the way through. I also realised that the first time, I had some expectations of what I wanted to see; which I decided to leave behind this time.

The good news is, The Matrix: Resurrections is not as bad as the first 1 hour. The bad news is, it is still pretty average and forgettable.

Unlike the original trilogy, which was a philosophical/existential story with action thrown in, this one is primarily a love story with action thrown in. In the original trilogy, Neo and Smith were 2 sides of the same coin and were shown as a (not romantic) pair. Now it is Neo and Trinity who are an unseparable pair and one cannot function without the other. This is inconsistent with the original trilogy because Neo did just fine without trinity for decades, before being freed. The original trilogy had a serious tone, this one tries to be funny more than once.

Some More Points

  1. Neo now has a new signature move where he can Jedi force-stop everything – bullets, blows, missiles.
  2. The Merovingian is now deranged and suffers from overacting. Looks like he was added for pure nostalgia reasons.
  3. The new Agent Smith is not at all menacing. He tries too hard to sound & act like the original one but comes across as silly. Also, no one knows why he is doing what he is doing. First he beats up Neo something fierce, but later on saves their group.
  4. The new characters like Bugs lack true character, although the new Morpheus is good.
  5. Niobe is a bigger bitch than she was before.
  6. Too many flashbacks from the original trilogy in almost every scene.
  7. The new Architect/Analyst sucks. The last Architect was a suave and calculating program. This one is sexist, gets beaten up by Smith and even gets bitch slapped by Trinity. While the original Architect prided himself on being a program and hence not a liar, this one is a lying, conniving crook.
  8. Priyanka Chopra as Sati with her fake American accent is horrible. I hated seeing her. She cannot compare to the Oracle.
  9. The final action sequence (swarm mode) feels like a zombie movie.
  10. By the end, even Trinity has superpowers like Neo. It is not explained how.
  11. The myth of “The One” has been debunked. Although the Architect confirmed it to be true in The Matrix: Reloaded.
  12. The background score doesn’t really match the mood of the movie.

On a positive note, The Matrix: Resurrections answers quite a lot of questions pending from the original trilogy.

Some Questions Still Remaining

  1. Why did Neo age only 20 years in the real world when 60 years have passed?
  2. How did Neo have powers in the real world in Revolutions?
  3. How is Smith still around, when he was purged at the end of Revolutions? Why didn’t the machines get rid of him, considering he was a problem for them?

Also, the end credits have this version of Wake Up

https://youtu.be/teZUOeotO5g?t=29
Wake UP live by Brass Against
Movies

The Matrix: Resurrections is a cruel joke

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I have been a huge fan of the original Matrix Trilogy. They were thought-provoking, philosophical movies. So, when The Matrix: Resurrections was announced, I was very excited. I followed its progress for over more than a year. When ticket bookings started, I booked tickets on Day 1 and went to see it on the release weekend.

I have only one thing to say: Lana Wachowski is mentally sick and needs medical help.

The Matrix: Resurrections feels like a fan-made YouTube video, but with real big-name actors and actresses, financed by a reputable studio. From the very first scene, it is evident that the movie was directed by someone with no artistic skills. There’s no story as such, just a collection of bizarre scenes with no connections to each other. I don’t joke when I say that creatively challenged me would have made a better sequel.

Neo is back as Thomas Anderson, who is now a world-famous game developer. He is the developer of the Matrix Trilogy of games, who is forced by his company to develop Part four against his will. He is also a suicide survivor. His favourite thing is repeating “This can’t be real” over and over again and making cringey faces. Also,

  • Morpheus is somehow Agent Smith
  • Thomas Anderson’s boss is also somehow Agent Smith
  • Trinity is “Tiffany”, who people openly call a “MILF”

In the scene where Thomas Anderson meets “Tiffany” for the first time, her son asks him “Are you going to bone my mom?”.

What the fuck did I just see?

I had to pinch myself a few times to check whether I was dreaming or if all this was real. I also kept waiting to see if this was all just a joke and the real movie would start soon. Eventually, I couldn’t take any more and left an hour in. I don’t remember watching a movie this bad that I left before the interval. Even the propaganda video everyone is forced to watch and stand for was more entertaining.

I thought Chronicles of Riddick was the worst sequel ever, but this takes the cake. This is not only the worst sequel ever, but possibly the worst big-budget movie ever made.

I wonder at what point the cast and crew of the movie realised how shitty this movie is going to be and but were too embarassed to back out.

Now please excuse myself while I cleanse my brain by consuming alcohol and pretend that this never happened.

Rant

Chandigarh Boys

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I loved living in Chandigarh and still miss it terribly. There’s something about the well planned, laid back nature of the city that attracts me to it. But it was after I left that place that I began to notice that the boys of Chandigarh were somehow different from the boys in the rest of India. Especially the ones who have stayed there their entire lives and never moved out.

Chandigarh Boys, PC: Youtube
Chandigarh Boys, PC: Youtube

Chandigarh Boys

  1. Consider themselves superior to the rest of Indians.
  2. Don’t have much exposure to the world outside their tri-city area. For them everything beyond Delhi is “South India”.
  3. Brag about their “kothis” and discuss their sizes in “marla” and “kanals“.
  4. Plan whose farmhouse they will take girls to, on the weekend.
  5. When going to Sector 17, park their cars in the parking lots at the outer peripheries of the market, where parking is ₹5 cheaper.
  6. Drive scooters/motorcycles/cars starting at the age of 12.
  7. Take the above vehicles on the Gedi Route in the evenings & weekends.
  8. Call Discos and clubs as “disc”.
  9. Those who cannot afford clubbing, drink with friends in the car (Also applicable to West Delhi boys).
  10. Brag about which discos in South Delhi they have visited.
  11. Even if you are from Mohali/Panchkula/Zirakpur, tell people you are from Chandigarh. I myself have been guilty of this.
  12. If you stay in Chandigarh, look down on the people from Mohali/Panchkula/Zirakpur.
  13. If you go to one of the Catholic Boys Schools (St. Johns, St. Anne’s), look down at kids from the other schools.
  14. Casually throw around the name of Le Corbusier to visitors.
  15. Make out with girls in your car, parked in the narrow unpaved road behind the lake.
  16. Always know influential people via someone’s father or uncle. For events, ask these people for free passes, because Chandigarh Boys don’t pay for shit. Also pull favours when caught by police for traffic/underage drinking violations.
  17. On Sundays go to pray at Nada Sahib or Mansa Devi to absolve yourselves of the sins of the week; organize “bhandaras” if sins are especially serious.
  18. When asked where they are from, answer with “The City Beautiful” as if the entire country/world is familiar with this phrase.
TV Shows

Invasion has grand ambitions but falls short

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Invasion is a Sci-Fi show on Apple TV+. I actually wanted to watch Foundation but it proved too complicated and big for me, so I settled for this. The show has great special effects, good production values & a huge budget. But eventually, it ends up disappointing because of flaws in the story and the annoying characters.

Entitled American Soldier annoyed with the eponymous Invasion, PC: Series TV Online

The story is about the invasion of earth by Aliens. It follows 4 characters around the world affected by the invasion. Like other similar shows and movies, you just know the paths of these characters will merge at some point in the show. I won’t go too much into the story, because it’s the characters who sink the show.

The Characters

Sherrif Tyson is a typical old-school/small-town Sherrif who realises during his retirement party that his career has been too lacklustre. Tyson is played by Sam Neill, who is the only big-name actor in this show. All the trailers of this show focussed mostly on his characters and misled people into thinking that the show revolved around him. Instead, he appears only in one episode, climbs a few ladders, grunts a bit a then dies.

Maliks are an Islamic immigrant family living in New York. The wife is plain-looking and homely, so the husband fucks and impregnates an attractive American woman. As revenge, the wife abandons him twice to die. First time the aliens almost kill him, second time she abandons him to gun-toting vigilantes. The family pretends to be victims of Xenophobia, but the wife proves the entire point of it by stealing an American family’s SUV & abandoning injured patients. At one point another American family provides them shelter, but the Maliks leave them to die. The children only squeal and shriek.

More Characters

Trevante is a typical entitled American soldier posted in Afghanistan. Trevante displays his American values from the very first scene by insulting and abusing Afghans, even those who help him and save him from certain death. He frequently demands locals to help him, steals things from them, all the while abusing them. Trevante continues his entitled behaviour even when he lands in London, demanding Britishers to give him an entire plane to fly him to the US.

Mitsuki is arguably the most irritating character in this show. She is a low-ranking engineer at Japan’s space exploration agency. Being an Asian and a Lesbian at the same time, she satisfies demands for inclusivity and diversity in the show. At work & off, she has no qualms cutting corners and breaking rules to get what she needs. After being fired for indiscipline, she is caught hacking into some servers. She gives her boss a lecture about love & he promptly hands over his all-access card. Mitsuki goes on to hijack the biggest radio telescope of her country without any repercussions. She even develops an AI program to decode Alien language in hours. All the while shedding tears for her presumably perished lover.

Caspar is a British epileptic kid who discovers that the seizures he has been having all his life are actually mind-syncs with the Aliens. He always gets his way because his mixed-race girlfriend shows everyone some shitty sketches he made. They casually convince Trevante to escort them to a hospital to induce a seizure in Caspar. The hospital, full of patients in need of help drops everything to do just that. Eventually, when his eyes roll into his head one last time, you can’t help but hope that he’s dead.

Eventually, the Aliens are defeated in typical American fashion. The Americans fire a nuke at their mother space ship and the alien creatures just drop dead on earth. Even I, an inferior human knows not to create designs with single points of failure.

Eventually, I am glad the season is over and I hope they don’t renew it for a second season.

Rant

Food Delivery Guys Suck Balls

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Food delivery guys suck balls. They have sucked balls on Day 1 and they continue to suck balls everyday since. I have experienced Food Delivery with multiple services and they almost always suck. In India it was Zomato & Uber, In Thailand it is Grab & FoodPanda. These “riders” make an otherwise enjoyable experience unpleasant.

What I Expect

  1. I choose what I want to eat and from where, I make the payment and place the order.
  2. The order magically appears on my doorstep after a reasonable amount of time.
  3. I enjoy my meal in peace.

Those who fulfill the above get a juicy tip and a nice rating.

What I get

  1. Calling me to ask if my order is confirmed. This is very common in Bangkok. You retard, if my order wasn’t confirmed, did I place it (and also paid for it) for shits and giggles? Even if I did, since I have paid for my order, your job is to bring it and not question my judgement.
  2. Calling me to tell me he is bringing my order. This was very common in India. I don’t need you to tell me you are bringing my order. I can see the status on the app.
  3. Calling me to ask my address. Asshole, my address is in my order. Secondly, I have also set my GPS co-ordinates to make things even easier for your retard self.
  4. Calling me to ask for directions. Use the navigation app on your Realme/Redmi phone instead of expecting me to ask you where you are and then give you turn-by-turn directions. I see many delivery guys and cab drivers as well who seem allergic to using the maps app on their Realme/Redmi/Vivo phones.
  5. Calling me from outside my door to tell me they have arrived. Never heard of a thing called a doorbell? If not, just keep the order in front of the door and get the fuck lost.
  6. Riding like maniacs on their ear-splitting mopeds. This one I write as a pedestrian/fellow driver, not as a customer. I think this is partly their fault & partly a result of the unrealistic expectations placed on them by their companies.

Most of these retards actually think they are doing good service by going the extra mile and calling me repeatedly. I understand that these people are underpaid and unskilled but it doesn’t require skill to use the food delivery app and the navigation app (which hopefully they are trained in).

Can’t wait for Drones to take over this job in the future.

Rant

Managers from Hell

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Over my 15 years of living a corporate life, I have had many managers. An employee’s satisfaction in their job depends a lot on the kind of manager they have. However, every once in a while comes along a manager from hell and for me it was no different. In my career, I have had 2 managers from hell.

Managers from Hell
Pointy Haired Boss, PC: Pinterest

Manager from Hell-1

I came across this manager in my second job. Let’s call him PS. He was young, energetic and came from a software company. He was one of those who tried to show themselves as cool in front of their employees, but in reality was far from it.

Immediately after taking over our team, he started to stir things up. We were working in shifts and everyone was happy with their shift. He started by suggesting we rotate shifts going forward. Everyone immediately broke into protest and shut his idea down, but it gave a hint about what to expect going forward.

He started to micromanage our team’s work. Out of the blue, he would come and sit behind us staring at our screen or listening to our calls. I remember once I asked him for 1 day leave to attend a friend’s wedding in Kolkata and he refused. I had to fly to Kolkata at the end of my shift, attend the wedding and return before my next shift, all with no sleep.

Needless to say, everyone hated him and wanted him gone. Eventually he ended up irking a senior employee & the employee went high up and got him fired. We all felt sorry for him, but were glad to see him gone.

Manager from Hell-2

I had the misfortune of working with him in my second job. Strangely, it was not while working with him that he caused me grief, but later.

Let’s call him GK. This guy was inept and somewhat stupid. He never interfered in my work, and I was left on auto-pilot for most of the time, which suited us both. The only drawback was that to make up for his ineptitude, he indulged in office activities and pushed others to, too. Things like office decoration, arrangement of parties, sucking up to his bosses & other such activities.

Once, during a an office party, he invited me to come to the dance floor and dance. I was happy drinking in the sidelines, so politely refused. He kept on insisting and I continued to refuse. Eventually he said “will you come dance if I get a pussy attached between my legs?”. From that day forward, I christened him with the nickname of Pussy. Eventually everyone, including other managers started calling him that. He never indicated that he knew or was bothered, but deep down, he hated me for it.

I eventually left the job none the wiser. Years later when I tried coming back to the same company, I was blocked by HR because as it turns out, Pussy had put in a bad review for me just after I left. Also, he blocked my re-hiring when he was asked for feedback. Eventually, I had the last laugh because people higher up than him overrode him and I was hired anyway.

Others

Apart from these 2, I have been lucky to have good managers overall. My current manager is awesome and I am happy with my job because of it.

I suggest everyone in a corporate job or anyone who has had a bad manager to read Dilbert comic strips; you will relate to it. You can setup a subscription here.

Food & Beverage

An Ode to Coffee

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I love coffee. In fact I love it as much as I love beer. However, unlike beer, I need coffee. I need it desperately to start my day and function as a human.

Part 1: Cheap disgusting Coffee

The earliest I can remember drinking coffee is during college, to stay up at night to pretend to study. Since we were poor, it was Nescafé Instant coffee that we had. It was disgusting, but it was stimulating enough to keep one awake. The cold coffee at Anna’s was slightly better, although he didn’t put enough of the powder in, unless you nagged him. Anna also used the same Nescafé instant shit, so there was a theoretical limit to how good it could be.

Now, I would rather have an injection of caffeine directly into my veins than drink this cheap shit.

Disgusting Coffee
Disgusting filth, PC: gtPlaza

For the real brewed version, we went to Café Coffee Day or Barista. My favourite drink at Café Coffee Day was Iced Eskimo, a kind of slushy which took a long time to melt and finish. At Barista, I almost always had a Vanilla Frappe. Needless to say, we couldn’t afford this regularly.

During the first few years of work, I alternated between Nescafé instant at home and the office coffee machine. Around this time I also went lactose intolerant so started having my coffee black (Americano).

Part 2: Switch to Brewed Coffee

Eventually, I bought my own cheap brewing machine. I used to buy beans from Barista and used a grinder to grind the beans. I remember once I got coffee beans from Brazil and they were amazing and strong. After I switched back to my regular beans, I had caffeine withdrawal for a week.

Soon, I started suffering from acidity from the strong black coffee.

I read about cold brewing and how it is easier on the stomach, so started doing that. The results were great, but the prep was too troublesome and messy.

I also stopped having coffee after noons, as it didn’t let me sleep at night. I also discovered that the Chinese don’t really drink much coffee and view it as an unhealthy drink; preferring tea instead.

Eventually, we almost stopped going to Cafe Coffee Day and almost always preferred Barista.

Part 3: Sleepy Owl Cold Brew

I came across an advertisement for Sleepy Owl cold brew on Facebook one day. I read that they supplied cold brew concentrate in boxes and immediately ordered some. Soon, I was hooked. It was everything I always wanted:

  1. It was delicious.
  2. No prep required, all one had to do was mix and drink.
  3. It was easy on the stomach, while still packing a punch.
The best coffee I ever had, PC: Simpl

For the next few years, Sleepy Owl poured over ice was all I had at home. I remember during the COVID lockdowns, I was once almost out of it and had to ration till I could get another box delivered.

My Sleepy Owl recipe (after a lot of trial-and-error) was:

  • 225ml water
  • 2 cubes of sugar
  • 75ml Sleepy Owl Cold Brew

I carried Sleepy Owl’s brew bags when I travelled, too.

During this time, I also developed a morning coffee ritual. I wouldn’t look at my phone after waking up. Instead, I would make myself some cold brew and then sit next to the window with my coffee, looking out. I would do nothing else during this time, except sip slowly on my cold brew and savour each sip. I would do this for up to an hour before I would check my phone and start my day. It was beautiful.

Alas, it was not to last forever.

Eventually I moved to Thailand, along with the last 2 boxes of my Sleepy Owl cold brew. They lasted over a month, but eventually I had to look for alternatives.

Part 4: Thailand and Nespresso

I looked for Cold Brew in Thailand, but it was rare and not easy to get as concentrate. A fiend of mine suggested Nespresso; so I got a Nespresso machine. It combined the advantages of freshly ground coffee (pods are sealed) and convenience (just pop a pod in and press a button). To keep my acidity in control, I stick to pods with strength levels of 5 and below.

Nespresso, better than nothing, PC: Nespresso

It is no sleepy owl, but at least it tastes good and I can have different flavours every day. My favourite pods are Tokyo Lungo and Shanghai Lungo. My recipe is:

  • 320ml water
  • 2 cubes of sugar
  • A shot of Nespresso Lungo

There’s no Cafe Coffee Day or Barista here, but I love Cafe Amazon, a Thai coffee chain. I love their Iced Espresso.

My morning coffee is still the best part of my day. I can’t wait to return to India once again and get myself some Sleepy Owl & Barista.

Rant

Bengali Pride Fact Check

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Bengali pride is well known. Bengalis like to share facts about their proud heritage whenever we can. Not so recently, my shemale friend Putki shared the below image with Bengali facts with a photo of an unattractive female, in a group chat. So, I decided to check some of these facts (and more) myself.

Bengali Pride
Bullshit

Bengali Claims

ClaimTrue?Description
Bengalis are the 2nd in numbers in India.TrueAs per wikipedia, Bengali is the second most widely spoken language in India, after Hindi. Nothing to be proud of, though.
Bengalis are 5th in numbers in AsiaBullshitBut not by much; Bengali has the 6th highest number of speakers in Asia as per wikipedia.
Bengalis are 11th in numbers in the WorldTrueIn fact, as per wikipedia, it is the 5th most widely spoken language in the world, with 4% speakers. Nothing to be proud of, though.
Bengalis are the 4th most richest community in the worldBullshitI could find no evidence backing up this claim and Bengalis are not known to be rich anyways.
35% of NRIs are BengalisBullshitI could find no evidence backing up this claim. Specifically, NRI means “Non Resident Indians”, which excludes Bangladeshi Bengalis.
In 2018 Bengalis will be world No 1 community.BullshitThis one is so hilarious.
Bangla has been declared as the second language of LondonBullshitAlready been debunked
UNESCO has declared Bengali as the sweetest language in the worldBullshitAlready been debunked
Most Indian Nobel prize winners are Bengali/from KolkataBullshitAs per Wikipedia, there have been total 6 Nobel Prize winners with Indian citizenship till date, but out of these only 2 were Bengali.

There have been total 12 Nobel Prize winners with ties to India, but out of these only 4 have some ties to Kolkata.
Only a Bengali has ever won an Oscar from India.BullshitThis may have been true once, but as of 2021 there have been 5 Indians who have won Oscars and the Bengali Oscar was an honorary award.
Bengali “Facts”, debunked

So what?

Bengalis have many things to be proud of, but most of the above are not it. I hope people would stop sharing such bullshit facts on Social Media without checking facts because it is embarrassing for Bengalis, including me.

Bengalis should also realise that the days of Bengali Renaissance are long gone and instead of dwelling on achievements long past, we should focus on the present and future.

Hate, Rant

I have had it with Seat Swappers

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As the title says, I have had it with seat swappers. After years of tolerating (and sometimes accommodating) them, I have no patience with such people anymore.

I wouldn’t be wrong to say that most Indians are seat swappers and almost all seat swappers are Indians. Seat swapping is an integral part of an Indian’s psyche.

One of them could be a seat swapper
PC: Jetcost

Their mission goes something like this:

  1. Buy bus/train/plane tickets for yourself and your family members/friends, knowing full well you are not sitting together. Don’t rectify the situation by selecting your seat online.
  2. Show up on the date of the journey and board said vehicle, nonchalantly.
  3. Once on-board, look for an unsuspecting victim whose seat you like.
  4. Walk up to them and politely ask/demand that they swap their seats with you.
  5. If refused, give them a nasty look and find another victim.
  6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 till all members of your party are sitting together.

Ever since I was young, I have seen them in action. Whenever you board an Indian transport, you can see people frantically discussing this with each other. I can understand 30-20 years ago, maybe when booking train tickets, you were not allowed to choose seats. In some such cases, seat swapping was necessary. But at least for the last 15 years, Indian train ticketing allows you to ensure all members of your party are sitting together. For airplanes, you could always ask the check-in personnel to give you seats together. For last 15 years, you can select seats right at the time of booking. Same for busses, now. Most providers allow this for free or for a very small charge.

Whey then, do seat swappers exist? They exist because these bastards are too lazy to do even the bare minimum mentioned above and select seats. Sitting with the rest of their group is important for them, but not important enough to select seats in advance. Also, these people have no respect for people who did bother to follow the process.

When I travelled regularly for my job, I came across such bastards on almost every single flight out of/to India. In the beginning, mostly, I accommodated them. After that, I started accommodating them, only when the new seat was the same type as my original seat. Sometimes, I went through multiple rounds of seat swapping before being able to settle down.

Eventually, I grew so tired of all this that I started to pretend to sleep after boarding. Still, some shameless people would try to shake me “awake” to swap seats.

I remember one specific incident when I was travelling to Melbourne. I had paid ₹1200 out of my own pocket to reserve a window seat on the Air India flight. As expected, after I settled in, a woman came and started crying that she and her son got different seats and asked me to swap seats. I politely told her I had paid for my seat and I was not moving. She muttered something like “people have no compassion” and started walking away. Already on edge, I immediately lost it and insulted her in front of dozens of people. I told her that if sitting with her son was important for her, she would have paid some money and made sure they had seats together. I was fuming for hours afterwards at the nerve of the woman.

Interestingly, I have seen this behaviour only among Indians. Others either selects seats in advance or don’t care where they sit. In fact on one long-haul flight from Sao Paulo to Dubai, I saw a white woman sitting separately from her 2 daughters (both <10 years) and all of them were perfectly fine and behaved the entire time.

End of Rant.

Hate, Rant

Die Intel!

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My first PC came with an Intel Celeron 400 processor. Back then, I had no idea what I was getting; I was not aware of various PC parts & technologies. All I knew was that a friend of mine had a Pentium III computer and it was better than mine.

Dominance/Monopoly of Intel

Slowly, as I started to explore the world of PCs (with help from Chip and Digit magazines), I became aware of various components inside PCs and different technologies & brands. The market leader for computer processors even back then was Intel. AMD, Via and Cyrix were alternative brands. Over time, I began to hate Intel. I started looking at Intel as a company which made technically good but overpriced processors & indulged in false/misleading advertising.

Intel is Evil
Evil Inside, PC: LogoDix

AMD processors always fascinated me. When the Athlon series launched, I read about its performance with awe. However, AMD, VIA or Cyrix processors were very rarely seen in the real world, outside reviews. Cyrix & Via soon died completely and AMD remained elusive, plagued by overheating issues and solely in the realm of gamers & enthusiasts. When I did my first major PC upgrade, I had to get a Pentium IV because no one would assemble an AMD for me.

In the laptop space, AMD was even rarer. In fact, the first time I saw an AMD laptop was during my college days when Nihit (technically his girlfriend) bought a laptop with an AMD Turion processor.

I remember inheriting a Compaq laptop (which I still have today) from my father and it had an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. When Windows Vista came out, Intel released a beta WDDM driver for the GPU on this laptop, but later discontinued it. Consequently, the laptop couldn’t use Vista’s Aero Glass effect for themes even though the hardware was compatible. My hatred intensified and I swore never to use Intel again.

In 2000, Intel was forced to abandon its IA-64 platform for 64-bit computing and forced to license AMD’s AMD64 technology. They called it x86-64 and had to pay licensing fee to AMD for every processor sold.

My First AMD

In 2006, briefly, for the first time, Intel and AMD both had nearly equal market shares for Desktop CPU shipments. AMD would maintain the neck-neck competition till date, Intel was no more a monopoly. In fact, in 2021, AMD is arguably ahead of Intel.

When I moved to Gurgaon, I decided to assemble a new gaming PC myself, from scratch. I got the AMD FX 6300 and a Radeon GPU, shunning Intel completely. It cost me half of what an equivalent Intel platform would have cost and performed better. There were no heat issues to speak of.

Eventually I bought an Xbox and sold my gaming PC, never to buy a PC again.

Last Tryst with Intel – Surface Pro 3

I was re-introduced to the world of Intel, when my fiend gifted me a Surface Pro 3. To me, the Surface Pro 3 showcased the very worst of Intel. The external hardware, touch screen, keyboard and OS were all amazing. It was the Intel innards which sucked balls.

The Core i7 processor always ran hot, no matter how light the workload. Consequently the fan was always whirring loudly. It was so loud, you couldn’t sleep in the same room with the Surface if it was doing something. Still, the fan was not enough to efficiently cool the Surface and the CPU was throttled <50% most of the time. I had to install an external USB fan to keep it cool; which was ridiculous.

On top of that, it had issues with Sleep which remained unresolved even after many firmware updates over many years. You closed the Surface and put it in your bag expecting it to sleep. It, however kept on running at full throttle and when you got it out to use it later, you saw that the battery was dead. Microsoft blamed Intel drivers and they twiddled their thumbs, as usual.

Eventually, I sold it and got myself an iPad.

ARM and Apple M1

For those who haven’t been keeping track, Apple transitioned their MacBooks from Intel CPUs to in-house ARM based processors in 2020. We (technically, my wife) bought a MacBook with an M1 chip. After using sluggish/hot/battery sucking laptops over the years, the MacBook blew my mind away.

It is as snappy as an iPad, the battery lasts all day (My wife uses it 8-9 hours off the charger) and there’s no fan and no heat to speak of. On top of all this, existing apps made for x86 work flawlessly and with minimum performance penalty. On the other hand, my work laptop (Intel Core i5) doesn’t last more than 2 hours off the charger and any computational effort make its fans sound like a jet plane.

I would not be wrong to say that the M1 is a generational leap ahead in computing from the old/shitty X86 laptops.

The Future

All mobile phones already used ARM processors. Same for all embedded devices and IOT devices. Apple would probably transition their Macs to ARM completely within the next few years. Many custom-made servers operated by the likes of Facebook/Amazon/Google use ARM already, too. In fact, the current world’s most powerful supercomputer also runs on ARM.

Once Microsoft get their x86-64 on ARM emulation to work properly, we should see a significant chunk of Windows ultraportables and laptops move to ARM. I hope AMD embraces the ARM architecture soon, too.

That being said, x86-64 isn’t going away anytime soon. Gaming PCs, Enterprise workstations, legacy applications requiring native x86-64 and most servers would continue to be x86-64 based for the foreseeable future and Intel would probably continue to dominate this space. I just hope they are reduced to shells of their former selves soon and then eventually die.

Earth bound misfit, I